alt Hacker NewsExplained above, I WFH, single (no kids) and have an EV - but I don't use the car for commute etc so I can be choosy about when I charge the car and take advantage of the ultra cheap periods.
Fixed price advantage is you use power whenever you want. Your average unit rate is just the price on the tariff. Predictable and safe.
Agile price changes every 30 minutes, so you need to do a little planning. But if you take advantage of the cheap periods you'll generally come out on top. My average unit rate last year was like 16.5p p/kWh whereas the standard tariff was 23-24p, so some nice savings. There's also some risk involved - the price can go up to £1 p/kWh and a few days in winter in 2024 it did that for a short while (around the peak periods) so you have to take on that risk - and obviously being exposed to the world energy markets does mean you get exposure to stuff like wars impacting global markets.
I mean there's nothing stopping you from using lots of power between 4pm-7pm it's just you'll drag that average unit rate up to the point where it's probably not worth it. When I say "use lots of power" I don't mean like I sit in the dark between 4-7pm, it's just I avoid the big ticket power users like ovens, showers, cookers etc
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A decade back, in the US, the local power company would give you a discount if you used less energy than average during peak hours. At the time I had a vacant rental, very little energy use. (FWIW I’ve since sold it, being a landlord isn’t a good time)
I watched a specific neighbor go through great pains to honor this system and so as to reap the benefits of a much lower bill. Sweating their buns off during the hottest part of the day, open windows, no tv on, etc. fully committed.
They saved 8 dollars that month. My vacant rental, not doing a goddamn thing, saved 6 dollars.
If your system is similar, you’re optimizing your life around the cost of a monthly Netflix subscription, at best.
Yeah, and the really important point is that you get to see the prices a day ahead, which is what makes it actually pretty easy to live with.
For instance, if I know it's going to be expensive when I'd be cooking tomorrow's evening meal, then I won't make something that would need a long time in the oven. And if it's going to be particularly cheap around lunchtime, then I'll plan to do a big load of laundry then.
I have electric heating, which I thought might be a cause of anxiety but it's not really worked out that way. The temperature in my flat won't go down by more than a degree or two with the heating off over the course of the sort of 4 hour price spikes you tend to see in mid-January. If it looks like it's going to be unusually bad, I could always raise the temp by half a degree beforehand, but in reality I've only bothered to do that maybe three times in the past couple of years.
Basically, it's just another thing to factor in when planning my day. No more of a hassle than checking the weather forecast or glancing at my calendar.